Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO Techniques

You might have heard Matt Cutts or any other SEO expert advising you about not using any unethical SEO practice. And beyond any doubts, they are absolutely right. But Black Hat SEO is a reality we have to face sooner or later in our roles as SEO practitioners. There are some SEO practitioners who deem Black Hat SEO as important. They justify their statements with some mindless logic. If you’re not winning the game, you have to cheat. But they might not know that cheating always beget short term profits.

However, there is still one reason for which Black Hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged. It’ll at least guide you in what to avoid and what to follow to take your online business to subsequent level. Below we are lining up some black hat SEO techniques that should be avoided. Rest it’s your entire take to either go with the Black hat techniques or stick with the TOS of Google.

Using unrelated keywords: Some of the websites add keywords that are not related to their website or the images. This is basically done to mislead the users and to get more hits to their websites. To increase the hits on your website you must keep your content focused on one topic and use your keywords as per your content. Using unrelated keywords can be one reason for which you can get penalized.

Hidden Texts and Hidden links: It is all about disguising the content on your webpage. Either by making the text of the same color as the background or putting images that are visually undetectable as links. Using illegible content can of dire consequences to SEO practitioners.

Cloaking: Cloaking is the term used to display one content to search engine spiders and different content to users. This practice is to manipulate search engines and deceive users. But this is not of much benefit once Google finds out that you are showing different contents. You can run into duplicate content issues. Also, visitors coming once would not re-vist.

URL hijacking: It is like misspelling the name of your website with some popular website and misleading visitors. You can gain traffic by using this Black Hat technique but this can get in trouble. This is because URL hijacking is one of the illegal cyber crimes and falling into this trap would not be great for your website’s reputation.

Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is unnecessary addition of keyword in your website so as to increase the page relevancy by misleading users and search engines. This would give a temporary rank hike in search engine result pages but at last would end up penalizing you. The visitors who came once would never visit your website again, so poor number of re-visits is also a drawback of keyword stuffing.

Linking to spam sites: This is no more a SEO thing now. This is because Google now uses inbound links to determine relevancy. And if you are linked to bad neighborhood, it can give your website negative results.

Using Multiple H1 tags: Lately, webmasters are seen including several headline tags on each page of their website. They see a modest increase in their search rankings but this practice is easily detected by Google and you can be charged with a penalty.

These are not all the shady techniques that are included in Black hat SEO, there is much more to it. You can use them if ethics aren’t a deterrent for you and you can deceive the search engine robots. But for a long run, it is best to use ways that can legitimately improve your website’s visibility on SERPs. And believe it or not, once you do this everything else will follow to rank your website on top pages.